“He Set His Face to Jerusalem”
Luke 9:51-62
June 30, 2013 [Jacksonville]
Choices. Life or death, good or evil, handle with care or take risks. Our
text from Luke today is all about choices. Jesus makes the first one in v. 52. As
the old King James version puts it, “And it came to pass when the time was come
that he should be received up. He steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.”
“He set his face to Jerusalem.” He made a choice. He turned. He chose to go
to Jerusalem when he could have chosen to stay in Galilee. These are places on
a map. They are also places in our souls.
Do you know the difference between Galilee and Jerusalem? Galilee is
out in the hinterland. Jesus came from Galilee, a place of simple, rural people,
home, and safety. Jesus spent most of his life there without attracting the world’s
notice.
The word Jerusalem means “peace,” but it did not mean peace for Jesus.
It was a seething cauldron of jeers, mockery, lashings, blood and death. Galilee
meant peace, a haven, a home. Jerusalem a stormy darkness. But Jesus
steadfastly set his face to go there. The Greek idiom in the Gospel is “he made
his face into hard flint to go to Jerusalem.” Let us look this morning at that hardset face.
If you look carefully at his face, you see there the deep marks of struggle.
Don’t think that Jesus was done with temptation early on in the wilderness. He
was tempted all the way to the end, for two roads diverged. One led back to
Galilee, to home and safety and family and friends. Jesus could have gone
there, if he so chose to do so. Out there, beyond the green fields, is Nazareth,
quaint village close to the little sea of Galilee. He could have kept going to
weddings, like the one a Cana. He could have continuing drinking fine wine
around a dinner table with friends. He could have stayed in Galilee and
continued honoring his elders. Surely in Galilee there were people in need,
scripture to be taught, little children to be blessed. But that second road went to
Jerusalem and homelessness, suffering and death, and that’s the road he chose
to take, setting his face like flint.
Luke says that Jesus also gave some of his followers the same choice –
Jerusalem or Galilee. Are these would-be disciples simply naïve? Afraid? Or
are they smart, knowing well the difference between Galilee and Jerusalem and
also sensing which road they are going to take?
The first would-be follower blurts out, “Jesus, I’ll follow you wherever you
go.” “Do you really know what you are saying, Friend?” he responds. “Look,
foxes find their security in their holes and birds find safety in their nests, but I will
have no place to lay my head. Jerusalem offers no protection at all, just people
-2breathing ugly threats. And, you might be an open target for…a cross. Do you
really want to go there?”
Another: “Jesus, I’m coming, but my dad just died and we’ve go to have
his funeral first.” “Look, I’m sorry about your father, but forget going to his
funeral. Let the dead bury the dead. I know that sounds harsh and demanding,
but that’s the way it is if you’re coming with me.”
Still another: “I’m going to follow you, Jesus, but first I’ve got go back
home and hug my children and tell them good-bye.” “No, Friend, the moment is
now and urgent. It’s now or never. Once you take the first step, there’s no
turning back.”
Choices. Two roads diverge. One is safe-haven. The other is fraught
with peril and deadly as a cross. It’s the cost of discipleship.
I wish I knew which road those would-be disciples took. Which one would
you take? Which one would I take? I just can’t be sure.
But I can tell you of one who took what I would call his Jerusalem road.
His name was Frank Hall and he was the offensive coordinator at Chardon High
School in Ohio. On February 27, 2012, Coach Hall sat in the cafeteria of
Chardon High School, monitoring pre-school activity. His eyes swept the room,
then he heard two loud pops. “Firecrackers,” he thought. Then came another
pop and still another as he rose and saw one boy slumped over a table, two
others on the floor, and two more staggering away with bullet wounds.
“Here it was,” writes Gary Smith in Sports Illustrated, “the question lodged
in the recesses of all the educators’ brains in America. ‘What will I do if a kid in
my school pulls out a gun and starts shooting?’” Coach made a choice, and it
wasn’t a safe one. Confront. Step into the line of fire. He barged through his
table and straight at the gunman, his voice booming, “Stop!” T. J., a seventeen
year old loner and troubled teen, turned, trained his Ruger .22 caliber semiautomatic pistol on the charging coach, and it finally dawned on Frank: “One
finger twitch, and I’m was dead.” Their eyes met. The gunman’s eyes, it struck
Frank, were already dead. Coach ducked behind a drink machine and heard
another shot. The bullet was meant for him but instead struck another teen.
Then he saw T. J. head down a hallway outside the cafeteria.
Now Coach faced a second choice. Do as he had been trained to do in a
lockdown drill – herd the kids into a room and shove the largest thing he would
find against the door – or…at home he and his wife, a social worker, had four
adopted sons: two African-American, two biracial. Another step toward the
shooter would make all of them fatherless, again. He made the choice. “No!” he
-3bellowed, and he charged T. J. another time down a long hallway leading to the
outside.
A third choice. Quit playing Russian roulette or stop and go back to those
three kids lying in pools of blood in the cafeteria, all so easily justifiable. No.
Coach took chase again, yelling “Stop!” until T. J. vanished outside. Coach
followed but lost all trace of the gunman. “Coach Hall felt the hand of God,”
writes Shaw, “pushing him back through those doors, back down that hallway,
back to the three boys shot in the head.”
While running away through the woods, T. J. had his first chance to
change his spent clip with a new one. If he had not been chased by Coach, he
could have changed the clip inside and shot even more teens. The Jerusalem
path Coach had taken saved lives.
The police found the shooter about an hour later. Asked why he had
chosen those first three victims, he said, “I don’t know.” Asked why he’d run
away, he said, “Because Coach Hall was chasing me.”
Two roads diverge. Galilee, a safe-haven, or Jerusalem, a perilous road.
Jesus is calling. Which road might you take? Which one would I?
“And it came to pass when the time was come that he should be received
up. He steadfastly set his face to go to Jerusalem.”
Thanks be to God. Amen.